Preamble One, Part Three: The Melting Heat and the Noise
When Sergio was nine years old a tragedy struck his town. Until then he had lived a happy pastoral life in a small town that sprung from the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. It was normal for him to spend his early childhood days playing by himself because other children lived far away or chose to play games that did not interest him. He preferred to find large plots of land where no vegetation had thrived, and to draw elaborate things in the dirt there.
His drawings are best described as geometrical patterns but Sergio considered them to be pictures. One of his pictures, for instance, consisted of sixteen ovals that he intertwined to make one large perfect circle, or at least as perfect a circle as he could see from his perspective standing approximately one point two meters from the surface of the ground. With sharpened twigs, he dug those ovals deep in the dirt so that they wouldn’t be disturbed by rain and, in fact would be enhanced by the rain because the infrequent, short rainstorms caused his earthy canvasses to solidify a little bit. He felt as though he was carving sculptures in stone.
In the late-1920s, a special tragedy struck Sergio’s town. The nearby mountain had erupted with a spew of intensely hot lava and ran down through its crevices to the place where Sergio had been born and raised.
On that day, he was alone in a field working on his next masterpiece when he heard screams from people who were quickly approaching him. Before he could see anything unusual he smelled something strange and he could not identify the smell. Without any frame of reference, Sergio, to his dying day, remembers this smell as the smell of darkness. This memory was reified by when he looked up to identify the screams and saw an actual darkness covering the sky above him. The sight excited him because he associated it with the sight of a fast-moving rainstorm that would solidify his new dirt-art. But milliseconds later he knew that this was not an event to celebrate.
Almost immediately following his discernment of human screams, a view of a wall came into his view. This wall was built of people who were running towards him. Before he could discern how the wall had been built, he was swept up by it and lifted high into the air. The wall was in motion and it carried it with him.
At first, Sergio had no instinct to hold on to the wall, because it simply carried him. But he soon felt a heat emitting from the wall. And its heat increased to the point that he scaled the wall to the very top and held on for his life, panicked.
At this point Sergio’s mind was overcome with a feeling of numbness. This is how he remembered the feeling. His pre-developed brain was inundated with too many sensations for it to process. The screaming of the wall of people below him nearly deafened him. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut against a flow of intense heat, and the smell of the wall below him was unlike anything he had ever smelled before. It was as if his face was being forced directly above a pot of pork stew so closely that he had to close his eyes to shield them from the heat and the fumes, which were intense enough to burn the flesh of his face and disgust his nose. Somebody had vomited into the cauldron, and for some reason, his head was held forcefully and directly into these sickening fumes as people screamed into his ears from every direction. All of his senses were overwhelmed and he was powerless against whatever held him there.